The Never-ending Fairytale

A blog previously post on my original website that I've decided to repost - as after changing website providers, unfortunately my blog history was lost - hope it still holds some magic for anyone who reads it...                                

" Snowdrops beckon in the Spring

And dance with fairies in their ring”

Yes folks, I DO have fairies and toadstools at the bottom of my garden, although I admit they are shop bought and made from painted resin.  I also admit that at the time, I did not have small children or grandchildren to entertain and I made this little ‘scene’ (along with some others) as a fully grown adult to entertain no one but myself.  And finally, I admit that some of my poetry and little snippets like the one above are incredibly childlike and simplistic, which is not surprising as I also write for children, but not all of the ‘childlike’ things I write are specifically for children and some have deeper meanings.

In contrast, some of the other work I do is extremely complex and adult in nature, and a little anecdote that always entertains my friends when they ask about my freelance work is that one day I found myself working on a rhyming children’s book for 2-5 year olds for a client in the morning, then after lunch working on some toe-curlingly explicit hip-hop lyrics for another client in the afternoon - and I didn’t even bat an eyelid as this is often the norm for me, until I mentioned it to someone and they found it quite surreal that I was able to do that in a day’s work!

Where is this leading?…well let me begin with a little quote I came across recently via a friend (thanks Julie!) which coincidentally was after I’d begun to write this blog, but illustrates perfectly my inspiration for writing it:

And that’s what this blog is about…how I managed never to lose my ‘magic’!

Although I can empathize with this quote and have read many other versions of it, I am fortunate that it is not my first hand experience.  I was one of the few incredibly lucky children born to amazing parents to whom I am eternally grateful.  My parents were not creative, they were not well educated, they were not rich, they were not unconventional or ‘new-agey’ types, and they were not religious or spiritual.  They were not over indulgent with me, they did not let me have all my own way, they did not spoil me with extravagant gifts and they did not put me on any sort of pedestal. In fact most of the time they did not even understand me! 

But at the same time, they did not try to ‘tell’ me right from wrong, but ‘showed’ me by example, they did not try to instill their own beliefs or non-beliefs in me, they did not set major goals for me to achieve, they did not hold me back in my ambitions or try to steer me in other directions, and they did not shame me if I failed at anything.

When put like this, it may sound a little like they didn’t really care, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

What they did was love me for who I was, which might have been difficult to accept at times as a creative child, but it was this unconditional love and support in a happy and safe environment that gave me the freedom to find myself, to explore my creativity and become all that I am today. They allowed me my natural creative expression and gave me inexpensive tools and opportunities to make this happen like art & craft materials, books of all kinds (often hand-me-downs), left over decorating materials and creative play-opportunities (often using the furniture and household utility items) to mess up the house a little and expand my imagination. This, along with nature walks, beach trips, being shown the constellations, the beauty of the changing seasons, feeding the birds, caring for animals, family visits and many, many fun times. That is why I feel lucky and eternally grateful to them for all things they gave me in life that cost little or no money.

But considering that they were not creative people themselves, their greatest feat of all was that they did not stem my natural creativity…and they did not steal my magic! 

Passing on the magic, it’s contagious!

An example of this came to light in recent years when chatting to an old school friend (thanks Linda!) and she told me a lovely story about how her memory of a brief encounter with my parents when visiting our home had inspired her to encourage and give free rein to her two daughters in their expressions of creativity, who have gone on to do amazing things in different directions and are two truly awesome young women who are making a difference to people’s lives.  Linda remembers coming into my bedroom aged about 13/14, and being truly amazed that my parents had allowed me to paint a full sized mural on one of my bedroom walls…and there it was in its 2 year old garish glory… a full wall jungle scene complete with palm trees, a lion, a monkey, a parrot, and a snake to name but a few.  And still with a faint ‘chocolatey’ smell because I couldn’t get the right shade of brown I wanted for the monkey, so I mixed cocoa powder and coffee into the paint and the smell never quite left!

Anyway, at 13/14 and in the throes of adolescence while discovering fashion, boys and punk music…it was slightly embarrassing for me to be still living with this mural, but it was more difficult to paint over it practically as well as sentimentally, so it stayed until my next artistic decorating venture at 18…but so did the chocolate smell and the faint outline of a monkey and a lion peering through the cover job!

But, I digress…so the upshot was, that our planned girly chat in my bedroom (about boys no doubt…) made a lasting impression on my friend Linda, which stayed with her into her parenthood years later, even though we had lost touch at that time.  Linda tells me that one of her extremely creative daughter’s bedrooms throughout her teenage years was covered in art and poetry thanks to me, but it broke Linda’s heart when it needed decorating!  Well that certainly beats the jungle…and I’m so very proud and humbled to have played a teeny part in it!

And so that beautiful gift that my parents gave to me in allowing my creative expression, made such an impression on another person that it was passed on to her creative children too…which to me is completely ‘awesome’ in the true essence of the word! 

The never ending fairy tale…

 Fish tanks to fish & chip shops

Going further back in time, another amusing episode and example was when we got a new refrigerator and I was fascinated with the salad drawer, because to me it looked like an empty fish tank!  So I asked if I could borrow it one day and drew, painted and cut out paper fish and hung them from thread taped to the lid, made ‘gravel’ from painted polystyrene and plants from tissue paper.  The ‘fish tank’ was so impressive that my parents did without their new salad drawer for quite a while, until one day my mam (that’s our North East England expression for Mum/Mother!) sat me down and said “Okay Judith, it’s time to set the fish free as we need to see if the fish tank is able to keep the salad stuff fresh too.” And I was cool with that, I’d had my creative time with it!

Other fun times come to mind that were created (with friends or on my own, I didn’t really mind which) were things like a luxury split level apartment for my dolls using our 70’s style coffee table, the table lamp and a few cut up polystyrene egg boxes for ultra modern furniture; a human sized bus made simply with the dining chairs and a plastic plate for the steering wheel, an elaborate witches den with the washing basket as a cauldron and empty bottles for my potions, an exotic tent on the corner of the sofa made with a broken umbrella draped with scarves and junk jewellery, and a fish and chip shop made from that coffee table again, with scrunched up brown paper bags for fish, clothes pegs for chips, and the fire companion set for my utensils…all wrapped up in newspaper ‘to go’ for my customers!  There were also picnic tents and wigwams in the garden made from blankets draped over the washing line and furnished with cushions, creations such as life sized boats and spaceships sculpted from sand on the beach days, and magical forest walks hunting for animal tracks in the snow, rare birds to be spotted in the trees and splashing through puddles and kicking up leaves.  But the point of this is not so much the nostalgia (although that has been fun!) or the age old “back in the day…the youth of today…blah…” tirade, but simply to demonstrate the fact that what my parents ‘allowed’ me to do on occasions, I truly believe laid an important foundation which in turn ‘allowed’ me to expand my mind to the wide open book it is, and fuelled my imagination to the point it is today…where it knows no bounds!

And it’s so refreshing to see it still happening today, even in our age of high tech toys and communications which many people moan about - but I’m not one of them as I couldn’t do my work with my amazing contacts around the globe without it!  I often see people doing all of these amazing things with their kids and grandkids, and recently saw and commented on a Facebook post from a young mother I know who posted pictures of her little boy having great fun with a cardboard box from a kitchen appliance that she’d helped him make into a rocket ship that was undergoing an alien invasion! (Way to go Becca…and coincidental that I was in the midst of writing this, so fantastic to witness the joy in his little face inside his cardboard rocket ship!)

 And the fairy tale goes on…

So, looking briefly at the way my life progressed from there (without actually writing a whole memoir here!) as well as all the amazing stuff, there were many traumatic life events, mainly the sudden loss of my wonderful ‘Mam’ when I was just 16 years old, which was obviously a life changing experience in many ways.  I also came across many ‘withered magic stealers’ during my education and career development, but among them were also some shining examples of ‘magic makers’; those amazing light wielding individuals who stood out and inspired me to remember that the foundation laid by my wonderful parents (and other family members and friends too numerous to mention) had been dug way too deep…so this little girl’s magic wasn’t going anywhere! 

And I strongly believe this to be an essential component of my abilities to tackle projects of extreme contrasts in my creative writing work today, and the beauty I never fail to see around me in a less than beautiful world at times.  This is because throughout it all, due to the practical, hardworking and down to earth ethic of my parents too, I never lost touch with reality.  And I know from my own experience that it is possible to dwell in both worlds…and as Virginia Woolf once said, to “dwell in possibility”.

I would love to continue writing and go on to talk about the inspirations from my childhood books, many of which I still have in my collection today – but I think that may be a blog in itself, so will keep that for another time…watch this space, as the books and their beautiful stories could do with an airing at some point!

So, I’ll conclude by saying that I am fully aware that this is just my personal experience, and many people with traumatic or deprived childhoods go on to do the most amazingly creative things, so it is certainly no blueprint for creativity…and I believe that any true creative will surface to find their magic and creative expression against all odds.  But, if a spark of creativity is there, it is a truly beautiful thing to give opportunities to nurture it in any child or the inner child of any adult – and even better, to do it in the effortlessly subtle and natural way that my parents achieved - by just allowing me to simply ‘be and become’.

…and if by any chance, you succumbed to too many of those ‘withered magic stealers’ and are in danger of becoming one yourself, it’s never too late…

“Find your magic deep inside

It waits there with your inner child!”

The (never) End

© 2017 Judith C. Adamson